Thursday, February 21, 2013

Wolves have strong family values

Once endangered, these amazing animals are on the comeback, but that doesn’t mean they don’t still face threats.

By — Juliet Eilperin,
Published: February 20

Wolves have a bad reputation. They’re
the villain in fairy tales, and not everyone is happy that the number
of wolves in the wild is growing in the Western United States.

Many people see a group of wolves as a threatening mob, but Jim and Jamie Dutcher, who lived with a pack of wolves in Idaho between 1991 and 1996, know better. They see a group of wolves as a close family, they explained in an interview.

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Schizophrenia meds have severe side effects and don’t always help. But computer brain games might.

Consider the relationship between Lakota, the wolf who ranked
lowest in the Idaho pack, and Matsi, the second-highest-ranking wolf.
Lakota and Matsi are brothers, and when other wolves would pick on
Lakota, Matsi would come to his defense.

“Matsi really kept a special eye on Lakota,” explained Jamie, who wrote the new book, “The Hidden Life of Wolves,” with Jim, her husband.

The
Dutchers, who are photographers and who make movies based on real
events (documentaries), received permission from government officials to
keep 11 wolves in a 25-acre camp, the largest such enclosure in the
world. They raised the pups by hand, establishing a relationship with
them that allowed them to see how wolves live.

The Dutchers waited
for the wolves to come to them each morning, after which the animals
would sprint away in different directions.

At one point during
their time with the wolves, a mountain lion killed a female wolf named
Motaki. The wolves stopped playing for six weeks as they mourned her
loss.

“They moped around. They were visibly upset,” Jim said.

Wolves
used to be common in the Western United States. But as people moved
west, their actions brought wolves close to extinction. By 1973, only a
few hundred gray wolves were left in the continental United States (the
48 states not including Alaska and Hawaii). Wolves were listed as
endangered.

Since then, wolves have rebounded. There are about
6,000 in the continental United States and another 7,700 to 11,200 in
Alaska. Only two small wolf groups — Mexican gray wolves in New Mexico
and Arizona, and red wolves in North Carolina — are still endangered.

But
that doesn’t mean wolves are safe. The Dutchers, who gave their wolves
to the Nez Perce Indian Reservation, now spend much of their time
working to protect wolves through their group Living With Wolves.
Some ranchers and farmers worry because wolves attack their livestock,
and some people like to hunt wolves for sport; at least 1,500 wolves
have been killed in the past two years.
Kids are among the
animals’ most passionate advocates: Bannockburn School in Lake Forest,
Illinois, holds an annual dance called Wolfstock to raise money for wolf
conservation.

“A lot of adults, you can’t change their minds,”
Jamie said. “But children really are open-minded, and they can go
further in changing their parents’ minds.”

The film offers an abbreviated history of the relationship between wolves and people—told from the wolf’s perspective—from a time when they coexisted to an era in which people began to fear and exterminate the wolves.

The return of wolves to the northern Rocky Mountains has been called one of America’s greatest conservation stories. But wolves are facing new attacks by members of Congress who are gunning to remove Endangered Species Act protections before the species has recovered.

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Inescapably, the realization was being borne in upon my preconditioned mind that the centuries-old and universally accepted human concept of wolf character was a palpable lie... From this hour onward, I would go open-minded into the lupine world and learn to see and know the wolves, not for what they were supposed to be, but for what they actually were.

-Farley Mowat, Never Cry Wolf

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“If you look into the eyes of a wild wolf, there is something there more powerful than many humans can accept.” – Suzanne Stone